Residents of Mayflower, Arkansas, are suing ExxonMobil for damages in a class action lawsuit that is seeking more than $5 million in compensation for property damage.

"This Arkansas class action lawsuit involves the worst crude oil and tar sands spill in Arkansas history," the lawsuit reads. The filed claim indicates more than 19,000 barrels of oil were spilled.

Both the Attorney General Dustin McDaniel and the US Department of Transportation's Pipeline and Hazardous Material Safety Administration (PHMSA) have indicated investigations into the pipeline rupture are ongoing.

Between 2010 and 2012, pipeline incidents incurred more than $662 million in property damages annually. More than 20 years of PHMSA records indicate levels of pipeline related accidents are consistent – around 250 occur each year – while the cost of those accidents is steadily increasing.

These recently released images show the scope of the damage has grown far beyond the nearby residential street:

Above Image Credit: Alyssa Martinez / Drew Crownover / Annie Dill / Alex Shahrokhi via Imgur.

The EPA's On Scene Coordinator also recently released images of the scene:

Image Credit: EPA On Scene Coordinator.

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If only this were milk there would be no need to cry.

Cleanup efforts are currently underway in four separate oil spills that have occurred in the last ten days.

On March 27th, a train carrying Canadian tar sands dilbit jumped the rails in rural Minnesota spilling an estimated 30,000 gallons of black gold onto the countryside. 

Two days later a pipeline ruptured in the town of Mayflower, Arkansas, sending a river of Albertan tar sands crude gurgling down residential streets. And news is just breaking about a Shell oil spill that occurred the same day in Texas that dumped an estimated 700 barrels, including at least 60 barrels of oil into a waterway that leads to the Gulf of Mexico (stay tuned for more on that).

This week a Canadian Pacific freight train loaded with oil derailed, spilling its cargo over the Northwest Ontario countryside. Originally reported as a leak of 600 liters, the CBC reported on Thursday that the estimated volume of the spill has increased to 63,000 liters.

The accelerating expansion of Alberta’s tar sands has North America’s current pipeline infrastructure maxed out and, as a result, oil companies have been searching for an alternative way to move their product to market. As lobbying efforts around the stymied Keystone XL and Northern Gateway pipelines intensify, oil companies have been quietly loading their toxic cargo onto freight trains.

There has been a marked boost in the rail transport of crude in the last three years as new extraction techniques increase production in the tar sands. According to Reuters, “U.S. trains carried 233,800 carloads of crude oil in 2012, more than double the 65,800 carloads transported in 2011 and dwarfing the 29,600 in 2010, according to figures from the Association of American Railroads.”

Meanwhile the Canadian Pacific Railway’s crude oil volumes have skyrocketed from 2,800 carloads in 2010 to a staggering 53,000 last year. The company hopes to increase that number to over 70,000 this year.

Most, if not all, advocates of pipeline transportation will argue that the growing use of rail transport emphasizes the urgent need for pipelines. Pipelines are commonly touted as a more reliable mode of fuel transport than rail.

Pipelines, as the story goes, are safe.

Unfortunately for pipeline proponents, last week’s pipeline rupture in Arkansas is no anomaly in the history of US pipelines. In fact, pipelines have made a pretty consistent mess throughout the States for the last 20 years. One thing has changed, however: those messes are getting more expensive to clean up.

The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline & Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) is responsible for reporting and recording all “significant pipeline incidents” which are all incidents exceeding the cost of $50,000 (in 1984 dollars).

In terms of property damage PHMSA records indicate that the 20-year average (1993-2012) cost of significant pipeline incidents is over 318 million dollars, the 10-year average (2003-2012) cost is over 494 million dollars the 5-year average (2008-2012) cost is over 545 million dollars and the 3-year average (2010-2012) cost is over 662 million dollars.

The cost of cleaning up after pipelines just keeps getting more expensive.

Over the last 20 years, pipeline incidents have caused over $6.3 billion in property damages. On average during this time period there were more than 250 pipeline incidents per year, without a single year where that number dropped below 220. During that time, more than 2.5 million barrels of hazardous liquids were spilled and little more than half of those spilled amounts were recovered in cleanup efforts.

One of the factors contributing to the cost of cleanup is the introduction of Alberta’s diluted bitumen to southern markets (The most expensive year on record is 2010 when Enbridge spilled 3.3 million liters or 877,000 gallons of dilbit into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River).

Companies eager to move Canadian dilbit south to refineries and export facilities have been jimmying an aging pipeline infrastructure to handle the more corrosive substance and there is currently no federal oversight to monitor this process. 

Pipeline Network by Petroleum GeoGraphics Corp. on NRP.

Two decades of pipeline spills, mapped by the New York Times.

ExxonMobil’s sixty-five-year-old Pegasus pipeline that ruptured last week was one such retrofitted line. Built in the late 1940s, the old winged horse of a pipeline was reversed in 2006 in order to carry Canadian dilbit to the Gulf Coast via Illinois at a 50 percent increased capacity. The burst line sent a river of at least 84,000 gallons of dilbit running down residential streets in Mayflower and into nearby wetlands. 

The exact cause of the pipeline rupture is still unknown.

Many of the major pipeline operators – like Exxon, Enbridge and TransCanada – have been cited for lax inspections, shoddy emergency preparedness, and ineffective spill management and response. Both Exxon and Enbridge have been told their actions in the immediate hours after pipeline ruptures have made spills worse than necessary.

NPR reports “more than half of the nation’s pipelines were built before 1970. More than 2.5 million miles of pipelines run underground throughout the country.”

Debbie Hersman with the National Transportation Safety Board told NPR, “100 percent of the accidents that we’ve investigated were completely preventable.” In many cases companies performed inspections and discovered cracks and corrosion in the line but did not perform repairs before accidents occurred.

In an interview with Reuters, John Stephenson, vice president and portfolio manager at First Asset Investment Management in Toronto described these events as “not good for producers…not good for Canadian oil going south…not good for Keystone.”

But added, “the reality is this oil is going to make it south of the border, quite likely by rail or one of the other pipelines across the Canadian-US border, so I see it as a short-term hiccup at worst.”

Yet even a cursory glance at the history of pipeline accidents in the US shows what is happening in Arkansas is no ‘hiccup’ and will bear no ‘short-term’ consequences. At least, not for the residents of Mayflower.

Image Credit: Eilish Palmer, Lady with a Camera.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

As Think Progress has just reported, a bizarre technicality allowed Exxon Mobil to avoid paying into the federal oil spill fund responsible for cleanup after the company's Pegasus pipeline released 12,000 barrels of tar sands oil and water into the town of Mayflower, Arkansas.

According to a thirty-year-old law in the US, diluted bitumen coming from the Alberta tar sands is not classified as oil, meaning pipeline operators planning to transport the corrosive substance across the US – with proposed pipelines like the Keystone XL – are exempt from paying into the federal Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund.

News that Exxon was spared from contributing the 8-cents-per-barrel fee to the clean-up fund added insult to injury this week as cleanup crews discovered oil-soaked ducks covered in "low-quality Wabasca Heavy Crude from Alberta." Yesterday officials said 10 live ducks were found covered in oil, as well as a number of oiled ducks already deceased.

Photographer Eilish Palmer, known as Lady with a Camera, has been working with HAWK (Helping Arkansas Wild Kritters), a wildlife rehabilitation centre, to locate and help ducks and other animals affected by the spill.

When I connected with Eilish on the phone today, she was outside in the rain searching for more oil-covered wildlife: "I'm actually out in the woods right now looking for animals. We just found two dead ducks and one live one…We actually saw a dead wood duck and we saw its mate, it couldn't fly away, only walk. It was pretty saturated." 

Eilish said HAWK was the first responder for affected wildlife in the area but has since seen Exxon establish a local mobile unit to treat animals on site. "As the number of animals increased Exxon brought in their own rehabilitation centre because we were taking the animals to a centre about an hour away. HAWK doesn't have a mobile unit."

In addition to ducks, the team working with HAWK also found this oil-laden male muskrat, suggesting a number of species may be affected.

Faulkner Country Judge Allen Dodson said "I'm an animal lover, a wildlife lover, as probably most of the people here are. We don't like to see that. No one does."

He added, "Crude oil is crude oil. None of it is real good to touch."

The Exxon spill leaked 80,000 gallons of oil into an Arkansas residential area, causing the evacuation of 22 homes. This weekend Exxon Mobil Pipeline Co. president Gary Pruessing told displaced homeowners, "If you have been harmed by this spill then we're going to look at how to make that right." 

According to InsideClimate News, Exxon is currently preventing the media from accessing the spill scene. Today the Arkansas Attourney General announced an investigation into the cause of the 60-plus-year-old pipeline's rupture. 

The Pegasus pipeline was originally built in the 1940s and was recently dormant for four years before its flow was reversed to carry Alberta diluted bitumen from Illinois to the Gulf Coast. In 2006, Exxon called the line's reversal a win-win for the people of the Gulf Coast and Canada.

The revelation that companies transporting diluted bitumen in the US have some concerned about pre-existing pipelines, as well as the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that will transport the tar sands-derived oil across a number of ecologically sensitive areas. 

According to the NRDC, in 2011 a number of pipelines carried Alberta bitumen in the US:

Although the spread of oil refineries across the US receiving bitumen suggests the network of tar sands oil transport is much more widely spread across the States:

The network potentially connecting bitumen-carrying pipelines with other pipelines is quite extensive across the US:

Last week a coalition of environmental groups, communities and inviduals petitioned the US EPA and Pipelines and Hazardous Materials Safety Association (PHMSA) to place a moratorium on pending tar sands pipelines, including the Keystone XL pipeline, until new safety rules are established. 

"Simply put, diluted bitumen and conventional crude oil are not the same substance," the petitioners wrote. "There is increasing evidence that the transport of diluted bitumen is putting America's public safety at risk. Current regulations fail to protect the public against those risks. Instead, regulations … treat diluted bitumen and conventional crude the same."

Image Credit: Refinery map by ForestEthics. Wildlife photos courtesy of Eilish Palmer, Lady with a Camera, used with permission.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.